This invention relates generally to Time of Flight (TOF) Positron Emission Tomography (PET) systems and, more particularly, to calibration of TOF PET systems.
A PET system generates images that represent the distribution of positron-emitting nuclides within the body of a patient. When a positron interacts with an electron by annihilation, the entire mass of the positron-electron pair is converted into two 511 keV photons. The photons are emitted in opposite directions along a line of response. The annihilation photons are detected by detectors that are placed along the line of response on a detector ring. When these photons are detected at the detector elements within a small pre-determined time window, the detection is referred to as coincidence. The scan data, collected by the PET scanner, is a collection of all the coincidences along the various lines of response. An image is then generated from the acquired coincidence data through a process called image reconstruction.
Image quality may be improved by including time-of-flight (TOF) information of the emission data. Strictly speaking, TOF is the time taken by an annihilation photon to travel from the origin of annihilation to detector elements along the line of response, but this cannot be measured directly since the time at which the emission takes place is not known. Therefore, TOF usually refers to the difference in the time at which the photons are detected by the detector elements. The timing difference is used to localize the source of emission along the line joining two detector elements in a TOF PET system.
With time and usage, the PET scanner requires a number of precise timing calibration operations to ensure effective operation. If differences in the arrival time of emission source responses at detectors in a detector pair are biased, the image reconstruction process will shift data along a line between the detectors. Such shifts will introduce additional noise in the image, thus offsetting the main advantage that is expected from a high performance TOF PET system.
Known calibration operations are carried out manually by an operator and based on a recommended schedule, to determine and correct for potential timing biases between detector pairs. However, the manual method is only effective in determining state of a system when data is acquired, which is typically once per day before the first patient is imaged. A state of the PET scanner may change during the course of the day, for example, due to temperature changes in the scanner. Such changes may affect calibration of the scanner and may go unnoticed unless the operator initiates the calibration procedure at some other time.
Known methods for calibration of the TOF PET system require additional operations to acquire the calibration data, which are performed when there is no patient being scanned. However, this results in a loss of operational time of the TOF PET scanner.